Front Porch Digital, Inc., (OTC Bulletin Board: FPDI) today launched a Rich Media Services offering that will allow content creators including broadcasters, entertainment companies, corporations, educators, and government agencies to quickly and cost-effectively encode, index, store, and publish their video content in less time and at less cost than using a competitive offering or doing it themselves.

Front Porch Digital made the announcement at IBC2001 — the International Broadcasting Convention — currently underway in Amsterdam.

Front Porch’s service delivery experts have converted thousands of terabytes of mission-critical information in several engagements for some of the world’s leading financial institutions. One such engagement involves the conversion of 3.4 billion check images, which is believed to be the largest data conversion of its type ever performed. The same process expertise, care and experience is now available for rich media applications. Front Porch Digital, through its dedicated team of engineers, developers, service delivery professionals, and strategic partners, can deliver a complete range of Rich Media Services that address the complete workflow of digital content management: from content acquisition, encoding, indexing, and database building to content protection, business model support, and scalable distribution of your digital assets. Solutions may be delivered as standalone services or as part of a larger end-to-end system for the encoding, indexing, archiving and distribution of digital content.

This unique, efficient, cost-effective service offering can be performed on-site and off-line utilizing Front Porch Digital’s expertise, patent-pending hardware and software technologies, and proprietary methodologies, which result in virtually no usage of a client’s processing or labor resources, and minimize any impact to day-to-day operations. Or, services may be performed at one of our secure content processing facilities.

“For years, content creators have been searching for ways to justify digitizing their video assets in order to repurpose their content and exploit new revenue opportunities, but until now, a compelling solution has not been available,” said Jean Reiczyk, chairman and CEO of Front Porch Digital. “Front Porch Digital finally provides these producers the expertise, technology, and methodology in a simple, inexpensive, packaged approach to speed their migration to high-resolution digital formats more reliably and cost-effectively than any solution that has existed to date.”

Front Porch Digital’s Rich Media Services offering includes:

Workflow Development and Integration – Front Porch Digital consultants specialize in all aspects of video content management and deployment. They employ a methodical approach as they assess needs, develop recommendations, and provide guidance to develop and implement an end-to-end solution that meets client needs. Consultants work closely with the client to design and implement a customized workflow solution designed to meet unique requirements, and then integrate it with optional third-party applications and systems to provide a fully integrated digital asset management solution.

Content Ingest Services – Front Porch Digital’s content ingest services leverage a unique combination of expertise, patent-pending technologies, and proprietary methodologies applied in the capture and encoding of analog and digitized content. The Content Ingest Service features BitStorm™: Front Porch Digital’s real-time, software-based encoding solution that allows the user to create and store high-quality compressed data formats that are amenable to editing and transcoding (conversion to a different coded format) from a single capture of content without further loss of quality or need to encode and store multiple copies of the same content in different formats. This service supports high-end analog-to-digital and digital-to-digital conversions of content from all major videotape and optical formats in NTSC and PAL, and basic indexing is included in the encoding process.

Video Indexing Services – Through its strategic alliance with Convera, Front Porch Digital has integrated the powerful video indexing and search capabilities of Convera’s Screening Room® with its software-based content ingest service to create an integrated ingest and indexing solution. The video indexing service, which also integrates MediaSite’s Publisher® video indexing and search engine, can be customized to include various features of the application, including the database manager, indexer, editor and optional plug-in modules such as speech recognition, image and highlights indexing, and closed-captioning. Front Porch Digital’s Video Indexing Service automatically captures and indexes video content by visual scene changes, spoken words, audio types, recognized faces and speakers, and on-screen text, all of which is time-synchronized to the encoded video. The service catalogs content using metadata, closed caption text, and voice sound tracks, and supports the addition of editorial annotation to specific moments in the video. Front Porch Digital also produces a customized, web-accessible content management solution that enables the user to preview video clips, modify segments, and edit the descriptions of content using a browseable, searchable storyboard of images based on video keyframes.

Front Porch Digital’s Content Ingest and Video Indexing Services are fully compatible with Front Porch Digital’s suite of BitScream™ real-time, software-based transcoders. BitScream enables the user to convert encoded content to multiple user-defined formats and bitrates in real time, on demand, from a single capture of content without further loss of quality or the need to encode and store multiple copies of the same content in different formats. This facilitates the broadest distribution of content via multiple digital modalities, including:

Broadcast, cable, satellite, and advanced television

IP streaming

Video over IP (VoIP)

Removable media (e.g. DVD)

Digital cinema

Content Delivery Networks and Edge Network Delivery

Wireless networks

“Front Porch Digital’s patent-pending software-based, real-time encoding and transcoding technology, when integrated with Screening Room and delivered as a service, will provide significant flexibility and value to our mutual clients,” said Pat Condo, president and CEO of Convera.

Clients that will use Front Porch Digital’s Rich Media Services to extend their reach into previously untapped markets include: broadcasters that will repurpose their content for distribution via their websites and cable, satellite, and high-definition television; entertainment companies that are pursuing video-on-demand (VOD), video-over-IP (VoIP), and digital cinema initiatives; corporations developing and delivering webcasts, product launches, training videos and other material via corporate intranets; educators deploying interactive learning centers, DVD for distance learning, and streaming video for e-learning; healthcare providers using streaming video for education and diagnosis; archivists in the entertainment industries that are looking to digitize film and other media in order to preserve and distribute their assets; and government agencies looking to reduce the costs of travel and worldwide communications.

“Leveraging Front Porch Digital’s patent-pending rich media products and services will allow us to deliver the improved TCO and faster ROI that our mutual clients were looking for in order to justify digitizing their video assets,” said Robert Young, group senior vice president for SAIC.

About Front Porch Digital

Front Porch Digital Inc. (www.fpdigital.com) is an industry leader in the emerging market for the offline conversion, migration and distribution of information in formats that are accessible via any digital platform.